Rebecca Molholt-Vanel, RIP

There is a downside to sending out holiday cards. On anyone's list are old friends, longtime friends to whom you may only still send a Christmas card or occasional postcard. Rebecca Molholt-Vanel was such a friend. I met her through my ex- and news of her death came from him today, after his holiday card received a response from her parents. Rebecca was a friend whose friendship revolved around art. For many years even after my ex- and I split, she and I exchanged snail mail. I remember best an amazing afternoon spent in the bowels of The Atheneum Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts exploring some of their ancient Antioch floor mosaics taken from Turkey a hundred years earlier. She was an amazingly smart and humble human being with a gift to teach and inspire others to see the same beauty and wonder in art thousands of years old with a contemporary eye. She eventually took a professorship at Brown University where she won awards for both her teaching and her writing. She died after a brief illness (pancreatic cancer) in Paris were she'd moved with her husband. She was just 44 years old. She touched everyone who called her friend with a special grace and inspired so many others that her memory and her influence will long surpass her too brief life.